It's a Flawed World After All

Between computer-crashing worms and blackouts, a week like the one just past can make a person acutely aware of his dependence on technology.

Joe Tolerico, a computer programmer in Manhattan, caught it on both fronts.

Early last week, he cleaned his girlfriend Abby's computer of the MSBlaster worm that has attacked more than 330,000 PCs worldwide. On Thursday, he found himself in an office building in Queens when the power went out.

Tolerico made his way back to his Tribeca apartment, just blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center's twin towers. On Friday morning, he was sitting in his apartment weathering 92-degree heat, pigging out on food in his refrigerator lest it go bad and thinking of the best use of his remaining $6 in cash. His girlfriend had skipped town for a trip with the $100 in singles he's kept around as an emergency fund since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

All told, Tolerico was cheerfully making the best of it -- and cataloging a list of equipment that, without juice, mostly wasn't working.

"I work in the tech industry, so I use a laptop, I have a Linux server at home, and I have two PCs and three Macs at home as well," Tolerico said. "I have cell phones, Walkmen, digital cable with video on demand. Here in Manhattan we can only make local calls on land lines, and my cell phone is only working sporadically."

The Blaster worm failed to affect Craig Thomas, another New Yorker in the tech industry. Thomas, who sets up information technology systems for cable and broadcast companies, doesn't use Microsoft products. Unlike his in-laws, he's also learned better than to be completely dependent on what he calls "coupled" technologies -- such as electric-powered cordless telephones.

Still, he had a hard time calming down his 2-year-old daughter, Nancy, who became upset when the lights wouldn't go on when she flicked the switch.

"Last night she wanted to watch Bob the Builder, and I had three hours of battery power on my laptop," Thomas said. "She was happy -- although she didn't understand why the TV wouldn't work."

What seemed like minor annoyances to hardy types like Thomas and Tolerico were more substantial problems for many of the tens of millions affected when power failed across the northeastern United States and Canada -- not to mention the legions of hapless PC users crippled by the Blaster worm. In cities such as Cleveland, for instance, the power failure cascaded into water shortages and a collapse of transportation systems.

Experts agreed that the two episodes -- while unrelated -- offered a cautionary tale about the role of technology in our lives. The incidents laid bare the brittleness of increasingly complex, interconnected systems, leading some to question their near-total dependence on them.

"When things like this happen at the same time, we realize that we're living in a world that's wired and creative, but that doesn't make it any more predictable or understandable," said Rosalind Williams, director of MIT's Program in Science, Society and Technology. "We've created a second nature, and it still feels as mysterious and out of control as the God-given and nature-given creation. That makes us uneasy."

Certainly the Blaster worm has been more than a minor annoyance for Cedric Bennett, Stanford University's director of information security services.

Bennett spent much of the week overseeing the cleaning of 2,400 PCs -- nearly 10 percent of all those on the school's campus -- of the worm, as well as fending off other, less-publicized attacks on the same weakness in Microsoft operating systems.